


Marked

by Isilanna (Betazoa)



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Soulmate-Identifying Marks, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 18:15:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8811106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Betazoa/pseuds/Isilanna
Summary: A Soul Mark is a birthmark that reveals the first words a person's soulmate will say to them. Not every Marked person's story is happy, though, and many find happiness without or in spite of Marks.**Several drabble-esque pieces about Soul Marks**





	

Jake always wished he’d been born with a Mark, up until his mother died and his father started coming apart at the seams. He thinks it might be safer to find his own way.

 

* * *

 

Changelings don’t have Marks. They are all meant for one another, or so the female Changeling told Odo when he found their world. Each morning he carefully crafts words upon his skin beneath his uniform: _I don’t do whatever it is you want._ He thinks it’s the perfect summation of the fiercely defiant Major. When his people take away his ability to shift his form, he is left with the words on his skin permanently.

 

* * *

 

No one else but his mother ever knew what the words on the sole of his foot said before she had him taken off planet for a discreet Removal as an infant, but when Kira Meru speaks up after being brought to Terok Nor with a new group of comfort women, Skrain knows she is the one. He sees her own Mark, peeking out from beneath the hair she used to cover her scar as he removes that sign of disrespect, but it is not for him.

Later he learns that Meru was Marked for her husband and Taban for her – the forced Removals were not yet standard when they were children – but he can never return her to her family whose fate she asked after in her first words to him, the words once inscribed on his flesh. Not when the universe had delivered Meru to him. It was simply meant to be.

 

* * *

 

Growing up a girl with no surname like the rest of the children at the orphanage, a very young Leeta would caress the strange Mark on her ankle in secret and think longingly of the day when she’d finally meet her pagh'lis. Her Bajoran letters weren’t so good yet since there was only one Vedek to teach over sixty children and she didn’t know anything of Cardassian, but it was clear that this Mark was neither. At night she dreamed of someone from another world coming to save her from her own war-torn planet, dreamed of her own family and a name to go along with it. When the Cardassian women came one day and lined up all the Marked children for Removal, she tearfully stared at it for as long as she could, hoping to commit the strange lines and shapes to memory before they took it away.

When she is older she won’t be able to remember it at all.

 

* * *

 

Kasidy remembers when at six years old, she first held her brand new baby brother and traced her fingers gently over the words over his eyebrow. _Are you lost?_ Now he’s 28 years old and standing before the woman who spoke those words to him, at the altar of their wedding. Naima’s dress has a small keyhole over her ribcage to expose her own Mark, _Not any more._

Their story is so perfect and meant to be, Kas curls her hands despondently into the fabric of her dress, which covers only clear, unMarked skin. Her tears that day will be mistaken for joy, and tomorrow she’ll be back on her way to the furthest reaches of Federation space.

 

* * *

 

When K'Ehleyr had shown him the Mark on her wrist, Worf had felt honor-bound to marry her, despite having no corresponding Mark of his own for her. How could he do any less? But she’d swept away with her group of Klingon cadets before he’d even had a chance to propose a union to her, leaving him to wonder if their paths would ever cross again. Her arrival on board the Enterprise several years later had proven an unwelcome surprise after he’d spent no small amount of time during that interval brooding over her dismissal of him, likely the result of her disgust at being Marked for a callow youth, a Klingon raised by humans and pledged to Starfleet.

When he interrupts her session in the holosuite, she reveals at long last why she had not pursued him then – “I could tell from your face when you saw it that you would have wed me even if you didn’t want to, and I wasn’t going to be some pawn to feed your insatiable hunger for honor.” Even after their coupling, she refuses his offer a marriage for “a million reasons,” and he wonders if he will ever convince her that his admiration for her has nothing to do with honor or duty.

 

* * *

 

Weyoun is fascinated by the concept of the Marks. Neither Vorta nor Jem'Hadar have them, and once they have established their base in the Alpha Quadrant, he goes to tremendous effort to learn everything he can about them in secret. He wonders if the primitive Vorta had them, but can never ask. To speak of Marks is strictly forbidden by the Founders.

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted to my tumblr at betazoa.tumblr.com


End file.
